At the Vihara ("Buddhist Monastery")

My time at the vihara was a gift of peace and connection with those who live a life of dedication and meditation.  I was given the honor once again of presenting the dishes at the meal to Bhanti, the abbot, who is now 86 but still immediately launches into perfect English when he sees me.  Monks eat their last meal of the day before noon, so we met in the dining hall about 11:00.  As a woman, I could not directly hand the dishes to Bhanti, but placed them on a cloth on the floor, where they were then handed to him by one of the monks.  Still, Bhanti's vihara is unique and "revolutionary," as my Buddhist friend, Yuli, says in having a group of young nuns studying at the Buddhist college there.  They will either return to their villages as lay women or continue there as teachers in small colleges or as spiritual guides in the viharas.  Buddhists here in Indonesia go back long before the arrival of Islam in the 14th century or so, brought by traders from India.  There are now a small minority.

The visit also brought me into contact with "Sister" Mutia, who was so helpful to me, as a friend, and even as a psychotherapist.  She immediately asked me about my well-being and saw that I had done a good deal of healing since my last few months of pain over the end of the marriage.  Her very presence is a comfort.

I also managed to get in a trip to the "Gereja Igen," the cathedral church at the center of Malang, thanks to my good friend, Pak Habib, who was always willing to "jemput," pick up and drive us everywhere.  Habib's friendship was one of the special gifts of my time in Indonesia, because, as an anthropologist, he is knowledgable about so many of the cultural and religious oddities underlying the mainstream of Islamic religious life.  He loves talking about the wayang, Hindu goddesses, rituals of various sorts from the Javanese indigenous spirituality.

So as is obvious, the life here is almost too rich to capture in simple blog form.
  Once again, I would like to resort to the book I have mentioned and use a quotation that she ends with:  "Citizens of a bounteous land, Indonesians are united, too, by an extraordinary generosity of spirit, a tolerance of difference.  They welcome strangers like me into their homes and their lives, they go out of their way to help people in trouble. . . . .Indonesia's upsides--the openness, the pragmatism, the generosity of its people, their relaxed attitude to life--are ultimately the more seductive traits, and the more important."